This library defines a face named parenthesis used just for parentheses. The intended purpose of this face is to make parentheses less visible by dimming them.

We lispers probably don't need to be constantly made aware of the existence of the parentheses. Dimming them might be even more useful for people new to lisp who have not yet learned to subconsciously blend out the parentheses.

To use the parenthesis face, turn on global-paren-face-mode. The option paren-face-modes controls in what buffers the minor mode paren-face-mode is turned on.

The parenthesis at or before point, as well as the parenthesis at the other end of the s-expression should actually stand out, but that is beyond the scope of the mode defined here. Instead use one of the modes dedicated to that, e.g. the builtin show-paren-mode.

While this face is intended to be used with Lisp modes, it also works with other major modes, just add the mode to the value of paren-face-modes.

By default only parentheses are dimmed, customize option paren-face-regexp if you also want to dim brackets or braces. If you want to use a different regexp in different major-modes, then use a the mode hook to set the buffer local value.

Dave Pearson's parenface.el implements the same basic idea. Unfortunately that library doesn't use the appropriate Emacs interfaces correctly, so I wrote this as a replacement.